Talk:History of Kenshi/@comment-2A02:8084:D6C4:C900:C014:6098:2FE3:B673-20190501015643
Just some thoughts given the lore I am aware of and "hard sci-fi" principles: Kenshi is definitely a different planet, look at the sky at night :) Interplanetary travel for humans is far less probable than artificial intelligence or brain up-loading to robotic hardware. Even if a vessel from Earth could travel 1/30th of the speed of light, through some crazy tech, the nearest habitable or Goldilocks-zone planet in a diferent star system would be 1000s of years away. It simply is not worthwhile sending living humans on such a journey. Cryo-sleep is nonsense science (I'll explain if anyone's interested ;) ). Having multiple generations of humans living would make sense, but not for 1000s of years, too much loss of biomass and energy would take place in the vessel. Skeletons with enough biotech (single-cell embryos, artificial wombs) would be the best solution for manning such an expedition. So these Earth vessels reach the Kenshi system and begin establishing humanity's new home. The planet Kenshi appears to have an athmosphere, liquid water and even multi-cellular animal and plant-like life! There was no way of knowing this before setting out from Earth: we are able to barely determine atmosphere concentrations of exo-planets - oxygen, water and CO2 levels probably to help choose the target planet. SOME of the plants and animals on Kenshi are just too wierd to be evolved from Earth organisms in the timescales we are dealing with, they must be indigenous. Convergent evolution would explain any similarities (animals and "plants" existing, organisms breathing oxygen, beak things having 4 legs, for example). The Earth skeletons would establish orbital stations, land expeditions, begin resource extraction, building and maybe terraforming and changing the atmosphere. The goal: a new home for flesh-and-blood humans. The planet is suitable for human life, but humans evolved on Earth - Kenshi will never be optimal for habitation. It makes sense that humans would be generated as they are (greenlanders) but also be genetically altered in ways that would make them survive better in the new environment. For example: very dark skin to protect against higher levels of UV light, improved light-filtering in eyes, lighter, more efficient body builds (Kenshi is a smaller planet than Earth, less gravity, humans are evolved stronger than optimal this planet, hence they can use ridiculous weapons like the plank). Ladies and gentlemen, we got "Scorchlanders"; humans optimised for at least the initial settlement of Kenshi. The rest would be the slow begining of the Old Empire. Certain animals and plants would be genetically optimised for life on the new planet too, such as goats and bulls or edible cactus and the universal greenfruit. The seas, which probably had completely alien ecosystems, were populated with an optimally engineered fish ecosystem for human exploitation. I suspect the hivers were probably some form of native life-form present on Kenshi before human arival, albeit in a form very different from their current and most likely not civilised. The federation of political forces controling humanity's expedition would become what will later be known as the Old Empire, and they would proceed to bend both the planet and humanity to their will, using incredibly advanced technology. Human nature being what it is, the moment the struggle to settle humanity on a new planet changes from an existential challenge to an executable reality, tensions would flare. How much should the planet be exploited and changed for human colonisation? Should local fauna and flora be respected as owners of the planet? Are (probably) the orbital-station resident Greenlanders more human than the planet-settled Scorchlanders? What about the skeletons, who might have retained the instructions, directives and memories of Earth? The Okranite texts speak of a number of splits and re-unifications, an expulsion of a part of Okran to a "low place" and a number of "wars in the sky". A forbiden text speaks of Okran's precursor, Chitrin, being betrayed by humanity and calamities striking before Chitrin's sacrificial split. An expulsion of Scorchlanders and the old skeletons who made them from the orbital stations and a war over the control of these stations fits this scenario (in my opinion). You have to be naive to not be concerned when a group of people - who think you are a sub-human, gene-edited abomination - are sitting in a station far above your settlement armed with solar condensers (which was probably used to clear toxic terrain/pools of liquid while terraforming). The planet-side settlers would have most likely possessed shuttle rockets, control of space elevators and supplies to the stations, huge terraforming machinety, behemoths, etc. - more than enough to cause a space debris cascade or set a siege. The orbital folk would be in a position to devastate vast areas of the surface incredibly quickly. I don't know how the war went precisely, but the Scorchlanders would definitely win, at an enourmous cost. The Okranite texts are the closest I think we have to a blow-by-blow of what happened in these earliest of times, and it is incredibly brief. The remaining planet-side population would fragment and begin hundreds of wars over possibly hundreds of years among different groups: Scorchlander and Greenlander settlers, orbital refugees, old skeletons and even orbital Greenlander evacuees. Events that take place after would be: the massacre at Obedience, the great "purging-of-life" event that Stobe was involved in somehow, Scorchlanders using flawed gene-editing techniques on themselves to improve their physical atributes for combat (giving rise to Enforcers and eventualy devolving to Shek), at least two separate groups using gene editing to create obedient, expendable armies (hive and fishmen respectively) and eventually the skeletons of the Second Empire emerging on top. The rest is better catalogued in-game... I hope I made sense, thanks for reading it all if you made it this far :)